October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm
[An abandoned portion of the “Golden Gate Estates” — a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960’s — whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn’t been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that […]
September 27, 2010 – 10:27 pm
FASLANYC writes about the possibility of re-thinking the constitution, role, and importance of the maintenance manual, an idea which seems to me to be wholly appropriate to the practice of landscape architecture. Surely the languid pace at which the commands contained within a maintenance manual are executed (as FASLANYC suggests, “manual” need not be read […]
September 20, 2010 – 6:58 am
[A drawing from SUB-PLAN; click to enlarge] I’ve mentioned before that we try not to link to things that we suspect you, our readers, are already reading; this, of course, means that we rarely link to some of our favorite blogs. However: BLDGBLOG‘s latest missive — which is on David Knight and Finn Williams’ explorations […]
September 17, 2010 – 7:44 am
Infrastructurist has a quick summary of reactions to the Obama administration’s proposed National Infrastructure Bank. (The reactions are mostly positive, from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and The New Republic.) Of course, enthusiasm for the proposal — which, as far as I can tell, is an excellent idea — should be grounded […]
September 16, 2010 – 6:27 am
Writing for The Atlantic‘s Technology channel now, Alexis Madrigal makes a simple but important argument about how cellphones and other mobile devices, by enabling new ways of life, are affecting the form and density of cities: …the latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with […]
September 15, 2010 – 12:02 pm
[A portion of the port of Tianjin — radically determined by the requirements, conventions, and techniques of international shipping; bing maps] Writing for Current Intelligence, Serial Consign‘s Greg Smith (and guest co-writer Jordan Hale) discuss the history of standardized shipping containers, how that history has shaped the urban form of seaports such as Tianjin (and […]
August 31, 2010 – 6:16 pm
In the wake of last Monday’s Long Island Rail Road snafu — where “a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys installed nearly a century ago” knocked out train service for hours — the New York Times looks at five other American infrastructures which are exceptionally vulnerable due to the combination […]
August 26, 2010 – 6:56 pm
[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com] Wired‘s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system: In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, […]
August 25, 2010 – 7:43 pm
A prominent “architectural” critique of Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be that its architecture is insufficiently dreamlike (example: Aaron Betsky). At Super Colossal, Marcus Trimble provides a helpful corrective to that line of thinking, situating Inception within a repeated portrayal of generic downtowns in Nolan’s films. While the most important thing to note when correcting […]
August 19, 2010 – 1:23 am
[Sorting facilities at Port of Singapore in the foreground, downtown Singapore in the background; via flickr/Storm Crypt] Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the […]
August 18, 2010 – 12:23 pm
Will Wiles writes about the veneration of Jane Jacobs by New Urbanists, delving into his own history of reading Jacobs and coming back out with a series of well-made points, from the realization that battling over the legacy and proper reading of a single urbanist like Jacobs is rather unhelpful, to noting that proximity to […]
August 16, 2010 – 7:00 am
[Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon; photographed by flickr user The Impression That I Get] In A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes, mammoth briefly described the Google data center in The Dalles; in an excellent recent article, local The Dalles Chronicle reporter Theodoric Meyer investigates the relationship between Google and local public officials, the […]
Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2” pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression. I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of […]
Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are writing about research from Al Manakh at the Huffington Post, describe what they call the phenomenon of “Dubai-bashing”, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai. While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than […]
Writing on the LA Times’ Culture Monster blog, Christopher Hawthorne (probably the most essential architecture critic writing for a major newspaper in the States) notes a common flaw in both the recent Vanity Fair “World Architecture Survey” and the counter-list of “green architecture” Architect magazine put together: “…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces […]
[Architect Christ Hardwicke, whose project “Farm City” is pictured above, is one of the diverse group of panelists assembled for Foodprint: Toronto.] Google Analytics tells me that Canadians make up the second largest portion of mammoth‘s readership and that, of you Canadians, approximately one-quarter are located in Toronto. Neither of these facts are particularly surprising, […]
[At the Washington Post, photographer David Deal steps inside, above, and beneath the District of Columbia’s infrastructure and other hidden spaces — the “Third Street Tunnel blower room”, pictured above; Blue Plains settlement ponds in Southwest; the specimen room at the Natural History Museum; the Hecht Company warehouse on New York Avenue; and so on.]
In an “Op-Art” at the New York Times, author Tristan Gooley and illustrator Ross MacDonald share with us fascinating tips for “navigating the urban jungle” (tips which would fit neatly into Free Association Design‘s call for a study of embodiment and urbanism, like a manual for enhanced urban sensory awareness). The prevailing winds can be […]
“The objective is to convey 55 years of experience in the architectural profession and say what I can before the end comes.”
Adam Greenfield (Speedbird) wrote a brief piece a bit over a week ago for Urban Omnibus entitled “Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism”, which is worth a read. Greenfield first extrapolates from services like New York City’s 311 and the UK’s FixMyStreet the probable development of an “urban issue-tracking board”, “visual and Web-friendly, […]
